In 2014, Gartner introduced a new organisation model for enterprise IT called “bimodal IT.” In fact Gartner first started talking about this back in 2012 following the introduction of DevOps and agile development. Now Gartner posits that IT organisations of the future will have two separate flavours: mode 1 is traditional IT, focused on stability and efficiency, while mode 2 is an experimental, agile IT organisation focused on time-to-market, rapid application...

The number one risk to system availability remains human error, according to the latest disaster recovery industry report from CloudEndure.

The research examines the various protocols businesses have in place for downtime if – or when – it occurs. On a scale of one to 10, human errors – including application bugs – hit 8.1, compared to network failures (7.2), cloud provider downtime (6.9) and external threats (6.7).

I was delighted to see so many folks attend our Tech Meet Up last week in London. Not only was it a great networking opportunity, but we also hosted a stimulating panel that generated much discussion on the night. Here I’ve captured a few takeaways.

The panel included Jeremy Bowman, Director of IT Operations at iland customer Fusion Business Solutions, and Peter Godden, Vice President EMEA for Zerto, one of our key partners. Discussion centred on the many reasons...

Cloud Spectator, an analyst firm, has put together the second of its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) pricing reports, and found Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) crown slipping.

The latest study, which collected over one million data points over a 24 hour period on processor and memory, examined performance alongside other patterns, such as instability and unpredictability. Performance tests were conducted on five different virtual machine sizes across 15 IaaS providers.

What is the difference between cloud orchestration and cloud automation? An exploration of these two terms is more than a vocabulary exercise; it highlights a key challenge for teams looking to improve IT processes.

In most situations, cloud automation describes a task or function accomplished without human intervention. Cloud orchestration describes the arranging and coordination of automated tasks, ultimately resulting in a consolidated process or workflow.

It has been nearly five years since Vivek Kundra, then CIO for the US federal government, announced a “cloud first” approach to federal IT. Now, a new report from Forbes Insights and Microsoft argues there is a tipping point for government agencies.

Curt Kolcun, vice president of US public sector at Microsoft, notes: “Initial concerns around moving to the cloud are being countered by real-world government success stories.” In other words, worries about data...

It’s not the first time this has happened, and it almost certainly won’t be the last; Google has slashed the prices of its Compute Engine instance types, in a bid to continue to follow the Moore’s Law pricing structure.

Moore’s Law – the simple theory, predicted in 1965 that processing power will double every two years – just keeps on going. Google appears just as committed to the process today as it was when Compute Engine was launched in November 2013.

Analyst house Gartner has warned over the current position of the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market, claiming it to be in a “state of upheaval”, despite global spending expected to grow almost 33% in 2015.

According to VP and distinguished analyst Lydia Leong, customers are getting great value out of cloud IaaS, but as 2014 was a “year of reckoning” for many IaaS providers, some have been left high and dry, believing their current strategy was failing...

Many great innovations have come out of cloud computing, such as on-demand infrastructure, consumption-based pricing and access to global computing resources. However, these powerful innovations have come at a high cost: complexity.

Managing cloud infrastructure today is substantially more complex than managing traditional data center infrastructure. While some of the complexity is a direct consequence of operating in a highly transient and shared computing environment,...

Many IT teams find that their AWS cloud costs grow less efficient as “clutter” builds up in their accounts. The good news is that both AWS and a small army of third party providers have developed tools to help engineers discover the cause(s) of these inefficiencies.

While there are several “easier” fixes, such as Reserved Instances and eliminating unused resources, the real issue is usually far more complex. Unplanned costs are frequently the result of...

Newly released figures from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) show that cloud computing adoption rate in the UK currently stands at 84%, with that number expecting to sizeably increase due to the shutdown of Windows Server (WS) 2003.

Almost half of companies surveyed by Britannic Technologies said they had cloud-based voice and telephony services, while two thirds said they had a partial voice solution in the cloud.

84% of respondents said they understood the proposition of cloud computing, yet there were some intriguing responses as to why companies aren’t putting their voice services in the cloud. Almost half (48%) of those polled said they were concerned about security worries, while 38% were worried...

As most enterprise IT leaders know, transitioning IT staff to a cloud-based service delivery model is often more challenging than transitioning the infrastructure itself.

A collaborative, vertically-oriented IT organisational structure is crucial to the success of any cloud infrastructure, and yet the advice enterprises receive—usually some variation of “break down silos”—is not especially useful in an organisation with hundreds or even thousands of IT...

Cloud solutions, be they SaaS (software as a service), PaaS (platform as a service) or IaaS (infrastructure as a service), and public, private or hybrid in some way, are all growing at a pace with the options available to customers from a wide range of providers growing on a monthly basis. We are seeing innovation, immense computing power available affordably to all, and delivery of mobile on demand access to both business and consumer communities.

Adapting a large enterprise to exploit the new business opportunities presented by the On Demand Economy is no small feat. However, considerable resources now exist to explain and map how cloud computing can provide a platform for accelerating this capability.

Adopting cloud computing services can be a simple, tactical exercise to meet some immediate infrastructure needs, or it can be the catalyst to embracing an entirely new strategy for IT as a whole. This can drive an entire...

Digital Business Transformation projects gained momentum in 2014, as more companies moved their legacy IT workloads to cloud computing platforms and launched a variety of new cloud-native applications. This pervasive trend will continue and accelerate for the duration of 2015.Total cloud IT infrastructure investment (server, disk storage, and ethernet switch) is forecast to grow by 21 percent year-over-year to reach $32 billion in 2015 -- accounting for about 33 percent of all IT infrastructure spending this year, which...

Enterprises are only realizing 35% of the total potential value of their cloud deployments according to a recent Bain & Company study. Companies that moved development to IaaS and PaaS clouds from Amazon Web Services (AWS) reduced downtime by 72% and improved application availability by 3.9 hours per user per year.

The cloud infrastructure services market continues to grow at a rapid rate with Amazon Web Services (AWS) at the summit, and latest Q1 data from Synergy Research reveals AWS remains bigger than its four nearest competitors.

The data reveals how the trend of the cloud infrastructure market has been similarly plotted for the past year. AWS was not the fastest growing company during Q115, with only 49% growth, yet retains a larger slice of the market than Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and...

When start-ups and enterprises first evaluate cloud providers, they often choose an out of the box solution that fits their immediate needs. Their hosting provider promises great customer service, but they have essentially the same stack as thousands of other customers and still need a large SysOps staff to monitor their infrastructure.

This solution may be adequate for several months or even years. But most enterprises ultimately find that a one-size-fits-all cloud solution no longer actually...

The rapid diffusion for the cloud computing paradigm and promised benefits for the adoption of cloud infrastructure are attracting a growing number of businesses and organisations.

Of course, it is essential for organisations to maximise the benefits of migration to cloud architecture by reducing costs and minimising risks. Cloud computing represents a fundamental change in how companies use and provide their services. For many businesses of small and medium size, it represents a...

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